More and more documents are being made accessible via computer networks. Whether in an intranet environment (accessible only within an organization) or on the Internet, the growth in the number of documents made available on-line has been significant. For example, it is now common for companies to provide annual reports on the Internet and/or intranet. J.P. Morgan & Co. Inc.'s (which, by its merger with The Chase Manhattan Corporation, is now J.P. Morgan Chase & Co.) 1999 annual report is presently available at the following Uniform Resource Locator (“URL”): http://www.jpmorgan.com/annual/. A user may choose to view the annual report on a display screen, or may choose to print out a hard copy of the annual report.
While the availability of documents on-line has greatly facilitated information exchange, research and retrieval, the inventors of the present invention have noticed that none of the on-line document retrieval systems known to the inventors allows a user to selectively customize a document for printing in a single batch process. Referring back to the annual report example above, a user of current on-line systems may print the entire document by selecting the PRINT function from the user interface. However, as is often the case, the user may only be interested in information contained in a portion of the report. If only certain pages of the document are desired for printing, the user may view and print the desired pages individually.
As the number of individual pages desired by the user grows, however, viewing and printing each page individually can become onerous and time-consuming. The alternative is to print the entire document and discard those pages not desired by the user. In either case, there is inefficiency and waste of resources.
What is desired, therefore, is an on-line document retrieval system which addresses the disadvantages described above of existing on-line document retrieval systems.